Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Tarang

Timestamp:

Jul 16, 2012, 8:31:37 PM (12 years ago)

Author:

Trupti

Comment:

--

Tarang

@@ +1 @@
+Tarang
+aka Wages and Profit aka The Wave
+1984 171’ col/scope Hindi
+d/co-sc Kumar Shahani pc NFDC
+co-sc Roshan Shahani dial Vinay Shukla
+lyr Raghuvir Sahay, Gulzar c K.K. Mahajan
+m Vanraj Bhatia
+lp Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Shriram Lagoo,
+Girish Karnad, Om Puri, Jalal Agha, Rohini
+Hattangadi, Kawal Gandhiok, M.K. Raina,
+Sulabha Deshpande, Arvind Deshpande,
+Jayanti Patel
+Made 12 years after Maya Darpan (1972),
+Shahani’s biggest film to date is an elaborately
+plotted melodrama precisely realising his
+theory of epic cinema. An industrial family
+headed by the patriarch Sethji (Lagoo) is split
+when his son-in-law Rahul (Palekar) falls out
+with the industrialist’s nephew Dinesh
+(Karnad). Sethji, who became rich as a war
+profiteer, regards ‘wealth creation’ as a goal in
+itself and ruthlessly administers his personal
+fiefdom accordingly. Rahul, regarded by the
+family as a mere caretaker until Sethji’s
+grandson is ready to take over, is a more
+modern ‘nationalist’ capitalist committed to
+developing indigenous technology and
+minimum welfare arrangements for his
+workers. Dinesh, on the other hand, acts
+(illegally) on behalf of transnational interests
+which stand to profit by destabilising India’s
+sovereignity. These conflicts are mirrored in
+ironically identical ways within the working
+class: the corrupt Patel (Patel) is a trade union
+leader presumably aligned to the Congress
+Party who sells out to the management; the
+worker Namdev (Puri) finds his more radical
+union leader Kalyan (A. Deshpande) equally
+inclined to opportunism while another worker,
+Abdul (Raina), believes the established forms
+of political struggle to be inadequate and joins
+a more extreme left group which is also
+betrayed by his erstwhile leader. The only
+figure transcending these mirrored divisions is
+the remarkable Janaki (Patil). Widowed when
+her activist husband is killed, her commitment
+to the nurturing of a progressive force is
+repeatedly exploited by different factions and
+conflicting ideologies: reduced to prostitution,
+she is manipulated by Rahul’s sexually frigid
+wife Hansa (Gandhiok) into becoming her
+husband’s mistress. The money she thus
+obtains from Rahul is used to support the
+working-class movement. Forced by Rahul to
+become his accomplice in a plot to kill his
+father-in-law, she is made the scapegoat when
+the family conflict escalates into virtual gang
+war. At the end, the film shifts into a mythic
+discourse and Janaki becomes the elusive voice
+of history. Accusing Rahul of trying to
+manipulate what he never understood, she
+claims the forces of change to be ‘faster than
+the fleeting wind’. This sequence replays lines
+from the Urvashi-Pururavas legend from the
+Rig Veda as analysed by the historian D.D.
+Kosambi in his book Myth And Reality (1962/
+1983). The film adheres to Kosambi’s view that
+in India, the epic has often been the most
+precise language available for history itself, and
+much of the plotting is informed by the
+structure of the Mahabharata. In a narrower
+sense, however, the film is also a definitive
+comment on India’s nationalist enterprise, and
+on the tradition of cinematic melodrama that
+saw itself, and its formal assimilations, as the
+cultural vanguard of a modernising nationstate.
+
+[[Film]]